Warner Bros. wants to keep Christopher Nolan happy, so they only pushed back the Tenet release date by two weeks. Amid the chaos created by the coronavirus pandemic, Hollywood is keeping its eye on Nolan’s Tenet, one of the few major 2020 movies that didn’t significantly push back its release in response to the lockdown.
The coronavirus pandemic indeed began disrupting release schedules early in the year, forcing big ticket movies like Top Gun: Maverick, No Time to Die and Black Widow to postpone their arrivals until much later in the year. For awhile, Wonder Woman 1984 stood fast in the face of all the chaos until Warner Bros. finally relented and moved the film back from June to October. Outside of Disney’s Mulan, which moved back from March to July, only Tenet has held onto its summer 2020 release date in hopes of attracting big crowds to reopened theaters even as social distancing restrictions remain in place.
Despite director Nolan’s insistence on getting Tenet to theaters in July even amid the global pandemic, Warner Bros. did recently give in to reality by pushing back the movie’s release two weeks. As it turns out, WB wanted to push back the Tenet release date even further in hopes of protecting the movie’s box office, but Nolan himself offered pushback. As reported by the New York Times (via Collider), discussions between Nolan and the studio led to a “fraught moment” that resulted in Warner Bros. giving in to their most profitable filmmaker and only postponing the movie for two weeks.
Indeed, Nolan has made a lot of money for Warner Bros. since the studio first hooked up with him on 2002’s Insomnia. Much of that money of course was raked in with Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, which resurrected the moribund Batman franchise, but Nolan also scored big successes for the studio with non-franchise works like Inception (which is set for a re-release on Tenet's original release date), Interstellar and Dunkirk. That track record is why WB was willing to sink $200 million into Tenet, a thriller that appears to be very much in the same vein as Inception. And that $200 million budget is obviously why Warners is hesitant to rush the movie out to theaters even as uncertainty continues to reign over the entire movie industry.
It obviously remains to be seen whether the gamble to keep Tenet on the release schedule with only a small delay will pay off for the studio and Nolan. On the one hand, it’s admirable that Nolan remains committed to making films intended to be seen on the big screen even as the industry moves slowly away from the theatrical release model, and therefore wants Tenet to go ahead as planned. At the same time, it’s easy to understand Warner Bros.’ point of view as they’ve sunk a lot of money into Tenet and are counting on it hitting big. That the studio would give in to Nolan on such a major point speaks to how successful that relationship has been over the years, and how much power Nolan has as a filmmaker. In this case though, Nolan’s insistence on Tenet holding onto its July release date even in the face of realities beyond everyone’s control begins to look a little like mere stubbornness.
Source: The New York Times (via Collider)
